The present disclosure relates in general to system administration, and in particular to techniques for automating the administration of a plurality of computer systems.
Generally speaking, system administrators are charged with maintaining and supporting the computer systems used within an organization or enterprise. For example, a system administrator's responsibilities may include installing/patching/configuring software, monitoring system status information, performing data logging and backups, and the like. Each of these tasks typically requires the system administrator to login to the computer system being administered (either locally or remotely) and execute one or more commands on that system. In a large enterprise with hundreds, or thousands, of computer systems, performing these steps manually with respect to each computer system can be a time consuming and potentially error-prone process. Even with multiple administrators working together, carrying out an administrative task in such a manual manner across a large system deployment can take many hours, if not days, to complete.